5 Surprising Reasons To Get Off Social Media
The health of our society may depend on it. Also: 3 ways I beat my social media addiction
{Above: a brief message from me about this article. 28 secs.}
Do you think “I should sign up to be a paid subscriber” and then because you’re on your phone or you get distracted or don't have your credit card at hand you just….don’t? I do this all the time, but I’m determined to be more intentional and pay for the things that I value. If that’s you, too, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You make my work possible. Next week’s video is for paid subscribers only, and it will be a vlog about deleting social media. Upgrade to paid to get it weeks before it goes on YouTube.
A distraction, a time-suck, a place where we connect with friends but take our knocks from anonymous trolls. Social media. Even if we have a mostly positive feeling about social media, we know we spend too much time in futile resistance against the addictive pull-and-refresh that keeps us glued to our phones.
Last month I did a digital declutter and mostly stayed off the main offenders: Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram. The first few days I felt ragged, strange, twitchy, like I was actually detoxing from a mildly addictive substance. My brow was crinkled for days in a row.
Soon after, at about the one-week mark, I found clarity, focus and productivity gains that eluded me. I wrote more in one week than the entire year before.
With this newfound time, I researched the topic of social media’s deleterious effects and the results were alarming. Social media is harmful, and on-balance, bad for humanity. It steals time, dignity and purpose. It can be fun, but it nefariously robs us of our personal data. Here are 5 reasons to delete it:
💰 Our participation is making goofball technocrats richer, while we get poorer. They flaunt it on social media, too. For example Elon Musk and his $44 billion offer for Twitter. Why does he have that much money anyway, only to throw it at Twitter, the most garbage social medium of them all?
Here’s why: “[...] Tech robber barons take to social media to move markets and shape the political agenda of the day. At a time of record income disparity and wholesale market volatility, they peacock like influencers,” writes Horacio Silva in “I’m Rich, in Case You Hadn’t Heard” in the September issue of Town and Country magazine. (Italics mine).
A few men, and it really is a few and it really is all men, are getting wildly richer, and like Silva says, they flaunt it in our faces on social media. We’re caught in their matrix, except there’s no sexy 1999-era Keanu Reeves to rescue us.
📱 Social media: The cage we take with us. Here’s an excerpt from the book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier (Henry Holt, 2018). “Something entirely new is happening in the world. Just in the last five or ten years, nearly everyone started to carry a little device called a smartphone on their person all the time that’s suitable for algorithmic behavior modification…. We’re being tracked and measured constantly, and receiving engineered feedback all the time. We’re being hypnotized little by little by technicians we can’t see, for purposes we don’t know. We’re all lab animals now,” writes Lanier.
“Algorithms gorge on data about you, every second. What kinds of links do you click on? What videos do you watch all the way through? How quickly are you moving from one thing to the next? Where are you when you do these things? Who are you connecting with in person and online? […] What were you doing just before you decided to buy something or not? Whether to vote or not?” he writes. I should add that Lanier is a Silicon Valley computer scientist himself, not a scrutineer from an ivory tower.
So far, I have largely refrained from discussing the painful, deadly psychological toll negative comments take, because it’s such an obvious reason to get off social media. Here’s a home truth. Ninety-nine comments will be nice, but it’s the one rude, dismissive or truly vicious comment that will rob you of your sanity. And by the way, social media is engineered to toy with those emotions, says the techno-philosopher Jaron Lanier in, well, all the books I’ve read by him.
Hit Netflix show Terrace House’s Hana Kimura, a pro wrestler in Japan, died by suicide after relentless online bullying. Charges were laid and one unnamed man was eventually prosecuted for posting to Kimura’s social media, among other things, “when will you die?” He was fined only $80.
⏰ You’ll be shocked at how much time you get back. Delete your apps. First, a warning. If you delete your apps, you won’t know where to get your fix of distraction anytime something bores you: in a line at the grocery store, on the subway, waiting for your kids to finish swim lessons. What will descend on you is a sense of deep unease, at least that’s what happened to me at first. Where do I look if I can’t look at my phone? I got used to the idea of being bored and letting my mind wander. It was painful until it became transformative.
Georgetown computer science professor Cal Newport in his book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (Portfolio Penguin, 2019) suggests spending that newfound free time cultivating high-quality leisure activities. Reading books counts, as do long walks or more in-depth activities like gardening. I’d suggest baking and cooking, personally.
🦉You’ll take pleasure in the natural world again. When I made a concerted effort to leave my phone behind, I could see the world in Technicolor again. I noticed when the Japanese maple tree across the street turned a deep shade of wine-red. The trickle of the creek in a conservation area near my home burbled in my ears when I went for a podcast-free walk.
Artist, writer and Stanford professor Jenny Odell captured this awakening to the natural world beautifully in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Melville House, 2019). This book was actually a catalyst for me to start enjoying identifying the birds in Ontario, where I live, with a detail I had hitherto ignored.
Odell becomes a bit of a birdwatcher through her own journey to resist the attention economy. It’s kind of nice to have your family ask “What bird is that?” when they hear a loud chirping, and to be able to confidently give them the answer. (Where I live, it’s usually a cardinal, which has an unmistakable, piercingly clear chirp.)
🚨 Social media radicalizes us politically. This is indisputable. How it works is that social media plays on our outrage. This is the emotion that gets the most traction online. More time spent, the more amplification an issue gets. It gets us all worked up and fosters division. Neighbours whose politics we didn’t care about twenty years ago are now sworn enemies.
I’m not sure if I’m remembering this wrong but growing up, Toronto neighbourhoods had more diversity in their front-lawn political signs. We have three main parties in Canada: Liberal (red signs), Progressive Conservative (blue signs) and NDP (orange signs). My grandparents certainly didn’t think less of neighbours because of their differing political affiliations, even if they didn’t agree with them. That would not be considered a dignified way to behave. We have strayed far from these neutral, tolerant social codes. Everyone wants blood.
“Social media cares only about itself. And making money. Humanity be damned.”
Key realization: Social media platforms only care about themselves, and about making money. Humanity be damned. This callousness has been deadly around the world. Here’s a recent headline from Time Magazine: “Facebook Algorithms Promoted Anti-Rohingya Violence. So does Facebook’s good outweigh the bad? It certainly doesn’t seem so.
If this seems depressing, and it is, here are some ways that I choose to counter it.
📲 Delete apps! They are WAY more addictive than browser-based versions of social media, according to Cal Newport, a message he delivers often on his Deep Questions podcast. Social media companies invest millions of dollars to make apps more addictive, using its cadre of the best and brightest engineers to fulfill this mandate. Our willpower is no match for millions of dollars of Silicon Valley cyber engineering.
If you want to keep up with Facebook and Instagram, use them on your computer. Even TikTok can be looked at on a web browser rather than on a phone. This is one way that I am able to dabble in social media without feeling its irresistable tug to check back on it every few moments if I post something.
🥧 Learn how to resist the temptation of distraction. We have grown very uneasy with boredom. Learn how to sit with yourself and just be bored, or jot down thoughts in a notebook, or bake something, or learn how to make a spicy margarita, or clean something, or call someone you love. There is so much life out there to enjoy.
🎨 Reconnect with something from your youth. What did you like to do as a kid? This is so simple it beggars belief that we don’t reach for this strategy more often. Did you like crafting, or painting, or singing, or track and field? Even playing nostalgic video games like Streetfighter seem positively benign compared to the mess of entangling yourself in social media’s devilish attention economics. Personally, I decided to write. Write this newsletter. Any hour I spend writing is far better and gets me closer to my goals of being a better human than had I wasted it giving Mark Zuckerberg more data about my life and my friends.
I really hope these tips resonate with you. Even if you don’t take action, I’m glad I could share this with you. Thanks for reading and please feel free to share this! Even though it’s a newsletter, it’s readable to those who are not on my newsletter list, it displays as a blog post to non-subscribers.
And in case you missed it, here’s my latest vlog BEFORE I started my break from social media. Lots has changed since then, including my mood!
Warmly,
Helen
P.S. Last week I wrote “A Round Up of Really Good Things: October Edition.” Read it here if you missed it. I’ve also been playing with an online store of sorts, if you want to see it, this is my Shop My “storefront.” Some of you may not know this but I’ve spent years as a hair loss video creator. This storefront is basically affliliate links (I’m not selling Olaplex out of my basement or anything like that) so that I can send this link to those who ask me for links. Now everything is in one spot, including future Really Good Things. Thank you to my friend Lyla for the nudge!